The Perfect Girl

by Gilly MacMillan

Only when she’s moved away up the corridor do I step towards Chris and, almost as if it’s an afterthought, we embrace awkwardly. Chris’s grief hasn’t weakened him physically; he feels as taut as the skin of a drum.

  The police agree to us all going back to my house, and so we make the journey in an assortment of vehicles.

  I regret the offer when we arrive there, though, because the reality of having Chris in my house, and the baby, and Katya, and the teenagers, is suddenly overwhelming. A Family Liaison Officer has come with us too. Between them, they make the space feel incredibly claustrophobic even though my home is a good size by anybody’s standards. They leave no room for my grief.

  Richard notices how I’m feeling; perhaps he’s feeling it too. ‘Go upstairs,’ he says. ‘Take a few minutes to yourself.’

  It’s as I’m heading up the stairs that I hear him add, ‘Take a shower,’ and I realise that I’m still in the clothes I wore to the concert. He surely won’t remember what I put on yesterday, but he’s not stupid either and I wonder if his shower comment is supposed to have a subtext, or if I’m being paranoid.

  As the new fact of my sister’s death reverberates around my mind, I take a hard line with Richard: if I cheated, you deserve it. You drank me to it.

  I turn on the water in the shower and run it until it’s almost too hot to stand. I hear shouting from downstairs, and the baby crying loudly, but I don’t want to leave the shower until it’s unbearable to stay in it any longer, because there’s a part of me that can’t cope with any of them, and doesn’t want to look into a single one of their faces.

  I think of Sam, and of my night with him, and want nothing more than to be back there in his flat with him, where the river is our soundtrack and our view, and it’s just about us, and Richard is reliably drunk, and my sister and Zoe are OK in their new life and there are no more complications.

  And beyond that, as the water streams down my back, and tears stream down my face, I feel only numbness.

  ZOE

  We never went to Tess’s house much after Mum met Chris, but I love it.

  ‘Every house is a world of its own,’ Mum said when she and Chris were deciding on all the finishes for our Second Chance House. Mum had so many samples sent, for so many different things, and she would lay them out on the table and move them around like jigsaw pieces, looking to see which ones fitted best together.

  We had fabric, stone, wood and paint samples in all shades of tasteful. Mum went for muted colours and expensive stuff and everything was strokeable. She loved her choices. She would smile to herself when each new thing was delivered and looked just right and Chris would say, ‘You have such a good eye, Maria.’

  In the end, the world she made looked like a magazine. She loved it and Chris loved it. They never stopped talking about how much they loved it. Grace puked on parts of it and I told them I loved it, but mostly I missed our farmhouse. Katya, when she arrived, took a look around every room in the house and, when we got back to the kitchen, she said, ‘You have luxury lifestyle,’ and looked very pleased about that.

  Lucas never mentioned it, he just moved quietly around the different parts of the house and when he settled down anywhere it reminded me of a dark shadow cast over a patch of white sand.

  Tessa’s house is really different from the Second Chance House, but I properly love it. It tells lots of stories about Tess and Richard.

  The main one it tells is that when they were younger Tess and Richard travelled around a lot, and they collected things. Their house is like a display cabinet for all the objects they brought home with them, but it’s not posh. It’s warm and friendly, and full of pictures as well as objects, and you can pick everything up and hold it if you want to and splat down on their sofa, which has blankets and throws on it, and sometimes a dog that Tess is fostering for work. There are rugs all over the floors too, which you have to be careful not to trip over, because nothing’s perfect in their house, so they have curled-up edges and threadbare patches. Bookshelves clamber up most of the walls in the sitting room and the books are arranged in a higgledy-piggledy way, all different sizes and all different heights all over the place and nothing in alphabetical order at all. They’re mostly travel books, and science and vet books, but there are lots of novels too and stacks of DVDs.

  Tessa goes upstairs when we get back, and Richard tries to make tea for everybody, but nobody wants any, and Chris paces round the place until he stops and shouts at Katya.

  ‘Stop the baby crying. Can you stop the baby crying?’

  ‘Baby has lost mother!’ Katya shouts back at him with surprising force. ‘It is not time to make her be quiet.’

  Richard looks from one of them to the other and says to Chris: ‘Say you let me help on this front, what do you need?’

  ‘Baby needs somewhere to sleep,’ Katya says. ‘And milk.’ Richard’s kind manner softens her tone though she still glares at Chris with intensity. I wish I dared to look at him like that, but I wonder what he’d say if I did.

  ‘Are you up to giving me a hand?’ Richard asks Katya. ‘Shall we see what we can fix up?’

  She responds by hoicking Grace further up her hip and following Richard in a huffy way.

  Chris turns to me. ‘Did you actually go and see a solicitor this morning?’ he asks me.

  I nod. A headache is bringing tears to my eyes, and, because of what he said to me last night, the question feels like a threat.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You must know.’

  I feel my hands start to shake, and I don’t know what to say. I’m not ready to talk to him about that stuff yet. It’s been secret for so long that I feel like I don’t really have a vocabulary for it any more.

  ‘What?’ he says, even though I didn’t think I said anything.

  ‘I wanted Sam to help me. I know him from before.’

  Chris is standing in the centre of the room, with his arms folded and his hair sticking up because he’s run his hands through it so many times this morning. He considers me like I’m an interesting painting.

  ‘There’s a lot I don’t know about you, Zoe,’ he says and I bow my head to break eye contact with him.

  In the Unit, I shared my room with a girl who told me how she always did that to stop her dad beating the crap out of her. It sometimes works, she said, but sometimes it doesn’t, but it doesn’t cost you to try does it because they just want to feel like they’re the king of you.

  It works on Chris, confirming my view that most people are members of the fully paid-up schizophrenia club. They act one way, until they don’t. Just like that. Even Jason was all one way around me until he suddenly wasn’t.

  Chris sits down on the sofa in between me and Lucas, and he reaches out a hand to take one of mine and one of Lucas’s, like we’re going to pray.

  I don’t like the physical contact with him but I force my fingers to wilt into his hot palm.

  ‘We’re still a family,’ says Chris, and he chokes on his words, ‘and I want you to know that I’m here for both of you now.’

  He squeezes my hand hard, and then he stands and leaves the room without another word.

  Lucas and I look at each other. We’ve not been alone together since it happened.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  ‘Why was she out the front of the house?’ I say. ‘What was she doing there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He bows his head, and that makes me feel angry because I want more from him. I want the connection we had last night.

  ‘It’s all going to kick off now,’ I say, and he rises to my bait.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Sometimes when I’m angry I want to throw all the awful things that I know at people; I want them to feel all the horrible things that I’ve had to feel.

  ‘You can do that,’ Jason said to me once when I described the way that Amy Barlow’s eyes were open but dead and her ear was ripped half from her head in the back
of the car, ‘you can try to pull me into that scene, and wound me with it, but we both know that it’s a space that only you occupy, Zoe, and my job is to help you move on from that safely, not to join you there. It’s not my horror. You’re punishing yourself if you inflict this stuff on other people because it will only push them away from you.’

  I ignore Jason’s advice this morning and I try to punish Lucas with my knowledge.

  ‘Do you actually know what they’re going to do? They’ll take us in, they’ll question us, they’ll take our phones, our computers, they’ll make us wait, they’ll lock us in a cell, the investigation will go on and on and so will the trial. It never ends, Lucas. No matter what you do afterwards, it never goes away.’

  ‘We were all asleep,’ he says. ‘We don’t know anything.’

  ‘Were you? Were you asleep?’

  ‘Me and Dad were asleep!’ he says.

  ‘I was asleep too. I didn’t hear anything.’

  The thought that I slept while harm came to my mum is a torment to me, because I think how it could have been different if I’d not put my headphones in. Then I might have heard Mum go out, and maybe stopped her, called her back into bed with me and Grace instead. I could have done it, I could have pretended I had a headache, or a tummy ache, or something. She would have come, I think.

  I begin to cry again, but Lucas doesn’t move, he just stares at the tufted rug which has repeating geometric patterns on it that draw your eye round and round in a whirl, and even when my tears stop, we stay silent and I look at a line drawing of a building, which Uncle Richard has framed and hung over his wood-burning stove. It’s spare, and perfect, with orderly black lines on white like musical notation paper, and a thought occurs to me.

  ‘Do you think she went outside to see Mr Barlow?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘How do you know they’ll take our phones?’

  ‘Because it’s what they do.’

  ‘But we’re not under suspicion.’

  ‘I will be.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of what happened.’

  They tell you that in the Unit. If you’ve been done once, they’ll do you again even quicker. Makes life easier for them. Everyone in the Unit feels like life’s a conspiracy against them.

  ‘It’s not,’ Jason said when we talked about it. ‘Although some people do get stuck in a cycle of crime and punishment, it’s true, but that doesn’t have to be you, Zoe. It shouldn’t be you.’

  ‘My verdict was unfair.’

  ‘I know you believe that, and it might or might not be true…’

  ‘It’s true.’ I think about it every day, the feeling of being cheated at my trial, the helplessness of nobody believing me. In the Unit I still felt very angry about it, and although I still feel that way deep down, I’ve learned to hide it, because nobody wants to hear it.

  ‘Let me finish. Regardless of whether your verdict was the right one, or not, you now have to look forward, and you have both the support and the opportunity to escape the cycle.’

  My support was my mum, and my opportunity was music, which was organised by my mum, so what do I have now?

  Lucas says, ‘It doesn’t make sense that they would automatically suspect you.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to make sense,’ I tell him.

  ‘It’s paranoid.’

  I’m not going to give him an answer to that. There are things that only I know about this kind of thing. Lucas has no experience.

  ‘Zoe, can you do something for me?’ he asks after he’s worked out that I’m not going to rise to his comment.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Delete the email I sent you. The script.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Did you read it?’

  ‘Only the first part.’

  ‘Just delete it. I’m deleting it from mine.’

  He has his phone out now and he’s scrolling through it, probably deleting it from his ‘sent’ box.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter any more. It’s stupid.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pass me your phone, I can do it.’

  ‘No.’

  He scoots along the sofa, closer to me, and he puts his hand on my leg, which sends a jolt of something through me, but it’s not the same feeling I had last night when he kissed me, it’s stranger than that somehow.

  ‘I’ll delete it for you. Please. It was just a stupid thing. It feels wrong now. Please, Zoe. I lost my mum too, remember…’ But he struggles to find more words to explain what he means by that, and it frustrates me when he fails.

  ‘What?’

  A pause, as his eyes search mine, reading my impatience, then: ‘It’s complicated. It’s personal.’

  ‘You’re doing my head in,’ I tell him, which is something everybody at the Unit used to say. Then I ask him, ‘Have you ever seen a counsellor about your mum dying?’ because I wonder if I’ll have to. I don’t mind, if they’re good like Jason kind of was, but I do mind if they’re just patronising and give me sad eyes.

  ‘No.’ I feel like he’s lying when he says that though, because his eyes sort of dart.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know. Dad, just… Dad said we could help each other, that we’d be better on our own. It was fine.’

  I can see that it wasn’t, though, because of the way he bites his bottom lip, and then when he holds his hand out for my phone again, and says, ‘Please, Zoe?’ I hand it to him, because I’m soft. He taps away at it before giving it back to me and, when he does, I say, ‘They can find anything you delete, you know that, don’t you? They’ll find the panop messages you sent me.’

  I say that even though I know that it doesn’t really matter if they do, because they’ll know about my history anyway, as soon as they put my name into their computers, and sending a panop message like the ones Lucas sent isn’t a crime, but for some reason I still feel like having a go at him a bit. He doesn’t get a chance to reply to me though, before Uncle Richard interrupts us.

  ‘The police are coming,’ he says. ‘They want to talk to everybody again.’

  We talked to them a little bit this morning, but as a group, not one by one, which is what I know they like best.

  ‘Initial accounts,’ I say. ‘That’s what they want.’

  RICHARD

  Keep Calm and Carry On.

  It’s a slogan you see everywhere these days, it’s even printed on one of the tea towels that’s draped over the radiator in our kitchen. It might have recently become part of popular culture, but that slogan has its roots in wartime strength and self-sufficiency, and today I vow to be its living embodiment, because Maria’s death is a tragedy that has thrown our family into crisis, and somebody needs to keep their head.

  My head is actually gripped in a vice of white pain, the worst kind of almost-migraine hangover, and I’m as parched as if I’d trekked the Kalahari, but action has always been a better kind of pain relief for me than anything you can buy from the chemist. It helps keep feelings of shame at bay too.

  The bereaved family has only been in our house for about an hour, but already it’s the baby who is proving most difficult to handle, so I’ve decided to take charge of her.

  She’s a gorgeous creature, utterly charming, and I’ll admit to feeling quite fond of her already. The au pair was tending to her but she’s rather uselessly gone to bed, though the poor girl did look beyond exhausted, and I suspect that she and I are possibly suffering similar symptoms from the after-effects of alcohol this morning, although I have the benefit of having slept.

  Tessa didn’t come home last night. It’s a very heavy thought because you’d have to be born yesterday not to work out that it’s likely she spent the night with another man. If she hadn’t reacted so defensively, I might have believed that she’d crashed out at the house of a girlfriend. She’s in shock, of course, and that will have modified her normal behaviour, but she and I dance such a game of accusation and recriminati
on that I know guilty and defensive behaviour when I see it. I’m an expert in it myself, after all.

  As I cradle her baby daughter, my thoughts keep travelling to Maria, and the secret knowledge that I never warmed to her. She was a beautiful woman, like both her girls, but I found her prickly and, if I’m honest, shallow.

  Tessa disagreed fairly strongly, so we didn’t discuss it for fear of a row, but I didn’t like the way Maria and Philip pushed Zoe so relentlessly on the piano. As far as I could see, the poor girl never got to climb a tree or feed a chicken on that farm if she could have been practising her arpeggios. Philip wasn’t as bad as Maria, but he was guilty of it too. I don’t know why Tess excused her sister and Philip this behaviour. My best guess is that she carried around guilt about being the high-achiever, the good girl, and she felt happy because Maria might finally have a chance to match those achievements, albeit via her daughter.

  The invasion of our house is strange. Where yesterday I lost the battle with the urges, compounded by the silence of the place, today I find my self-control is performing fairly well. Odd, given the circumstances, and the levels of tension that are prevalent, but welcome nevertheless.

  When I take the baby upstairs to attempt to change her nappy, I waste three of the damn things before I get one on to her. It’s not easy to fit a clean outfit thing on those slippery limbs either, but I rather like the way she grabs my hand as I try. It stops the dratted tremor.

  On the way downstairs, I pause by the bathroom door. I have a bottle or two of vodka stashed under the bath in there, tucked away behind the cladding. My throat wants it, my lips want it, and my head wants it. It has even stolen my heart.

  As I prevaricate, the baby puts her fingers in my mouth – she’s obsessed with doing that, for what reason I cannot guess – and I pull her hand away and lick my parched lips. Come on, Richard, I tell myself. Pull yourself together. Somehow, it feels wrong to drink with her in my arms. She’s the antithesis of my grubby pre-owned path in life; she’s fresh and new and unspoiled and I will not sully her.

  I move on past the bathroom and down the stairs.